Tiny house design

Posted on June 17, 2015

Ta da! Presenting the Earth Morning tiny house design.

If you’ve spent any time looking at tiny houses on wheels, you know they are all fairly similar in design because of the size constraints of the trailer. Our tiny house has the same size constraints, but we’ve spent some time personalizing the inside. As you can see, we’re inspired by the Tumbleweed lofted bed design, with distinctions: Our bathroom will be located across the tongue end of the trailer; we’ll have a large kitchen with counters spanning two sides of the house; and we’ll have a stairway instead of a ladder so Lily can access the sleeping loft.

Our vital stats:

Exterior footprint: 8’x24’, not including trailer tongue

Interior dimensions: 7’4”x23’

Loft height: 3’11”

Cathedral ceiling height: 10’8″

Kitchen ceiling height: 6’4″

Bathroom size: 3’x7’4”

We created our house plan in Google Sketchup. There are a lot of pre-made tiny house plans that we looked at and could have purchased, but when we were doing research, the more we looked the more we realized that nothing quite fit us and our lifestyle. And tiny houses are so small, it was hard to argue with the idea of designing one ourselves.

Although the sketchup plan doesn’t look “finished,” it’s finished for now because we want to be able to play with the framing after we source our windows and doors. This is an important step! We’ll be looking at surplus materials in a lot of instances instead of ordering custom or off-the-shelf items. Keeping the finished materials off the design gives us the flexibility to change our wall studs without adjusting other parts of the design.

We threw some unfinished furniture onto the floor of the tiny house to get a sense of scale and also to see the best layout for our stairs and other items. Let me tell you — having this design is a relief. We’ve been able to “build” the house and know where each piece of wood is going to fall, before getting started. We headed off some wonky spots. And we have something to show off. It’s the start of something big. Tiny big!